Agricultural biodiversity — scaling up the future of food security
M. Ann Tutwiler, Director General, Bioversity International, reflects on the contribution of agricultural biodiversity to current food security challenges in her latest blog post.
Following the food price crisis in 2007, both donors and developing countries have rediscovered agriculture. As a result, there has been a promising increase in government investments in the sector. Many of these investments have been directed toward raising yields of a few staple crops — maize, wheat, and rice — and their related value chains.
While investments such as these drove the 1960s Green Revolution, and these crops will continue to be important in feeding the projected 9 billion people strong global food demand, a different vision of the future is emerging: from The Lancet series focusing on the costs of malnutrition, to the crisis in the Horn of Africa — which focused attention on resilience — and the Rio+20 Earth Summit, which for the first time brought agriculture to the sustainability table.
And yet, nearly 40% of the world’s total arable land is dedicated to the cultivation of just wheat, rice and maize — which also account for around 50% of the world’s global caloric intake from plants even though there are an estimated 7000 plant species cultivated or harvested in the wild for food.
There are many reasons for this decline of diversity, including the rapid expansion of large-scale agriculture production and more globalized food systems. But arguably one of the major reasons biodiversity is disappearing is because its role in improving nutrition, enhancing risk reduction and resilience is not well-understood. Bioversity International is focused on researching the key contribution agricultural and tree biodiversity can make to address these new priorities.
Let’s start with nutrition. In India, for example, Bioversity International and partners reintroduced neglected and underutilized species – including minor millets – with great success. This work is transforming the lives of marginalized rural people in southern India by helping them to grow more nutritious food for their families and communities, in some cases increasing their yields by 70%. Not only that, minor millets are resilient plants that need little care, and grow in marginal areas where major cereals often fail. They contain protein levels close to that of wheat, and are rich in vitamin B, calcium, iron, potassium, magnesium and zinc. Following a three-month study carried out with school children in the millet-growing area of Karnataka State, children fed on millets rather than rice made significant improvements with respect to weight and blood iron – the latter, in fact, was up to 38% higher in millet-fed children. Yet minor millets account for less than 1% of food grains produced in the world.
Our research finds that biodiversity is also a critical tool in adaptation, providing the 'natural insurance' to climate change — a key theme in light of the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are working with farmers and national partners through our Seeds for Needs initiative in 11 countries including India, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Honduras to identify crop varieties and species that are better suited to current and future climatic conditions.
The 'Seeds for Needs' team has also begun installing digital sensors called ‘iButtons’ in individual fields to measure local weather data, and together with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security’s Climate Analogue Tool, is identifying geographic sites and years experiencing climatic conditions of present and future adaptation importance. For example, for barley and durum wheat in Ethiopia, we have been able to predict the environment in which a variety or a group of varieties can grow 50 years from now based on their original location.
The shift to biodiversity-based solutions for agriculture will be necessary to limit the spread of pests and diseases, conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services and protect the food production base of the planet. Earlier this month, I spoke at length on the contribution of agricultural biodiversity to current food security challenges at the launch of a special edition of Farming Matters in The Hague, Holland. I look forward to the magazine’s focus on agricultural biodiversity and to shedding light on the evidence, benefits and next steps needed to firmly embed diversity in, and as a critical component of, sustainable and resilient agriculture for our futures.
M. Ann Tutwiler
Email: M. Ann Tutwiler
Photo: Farmer in rice field, Ghana. Credit: Bioversity International/C. Zanzanaini